Unlock revenue potential by building collection pages – with Joe Hale

If you're only a commercial site, build out collection pages because you are then going to open up a whole new world of untapped revenue potential I'm Joe Hale and this is SEO in 2026 So what's your number one SEO tip for 2026? So my number one SEO tip for 2026 is that e-commerce stores need to be using collection pages to maximize the potential of the RSI So what are collection pages for e-commerce sites? So collection pages for e-commerce sites are essentially category pages They are lists of products that live on the site that there's just so much potential but so many brands just aren't taking the advantage of Is there any difference technically between a collection page and a category page? No, it's the same like I use a terminology collection that's what it's called on a Shopify and that's what's that's what so many of our clients use Shopify and so many businesses around the world in e-commerce use Shopify which Shopify actually make it something easier to build out of these pages but essentially collections and categories are the exact same thing So Shopify is obviously your main focus so what's unique about Shopify in terms of how they go about offering you the opportunity to be able to build these pages? So I think the thing with Shopify is that it makes it so easy to do that's sort of like the kind of key thing that we see is that across kind of like any CMS you can build out a collection of category pages but on Shopify it's so easy to do It's so easy to use it can be abused or not done properly but how easy it is to do means that the barrier for entries then just live for people to get involved and actually undertake this as a project and kind of really build out the opportunity from like a non branded keyword perspective So what do you mean by it can be abused? How would you how would you abuse it not all the benefit of doing that? So there isn't a benefit it's pretty less so abuse but people just build collections for the sake of it or it might be that they might build three different variations of the exact same type of collection it might be that actually the full one they exclude one type of product or that they built a collection of t-shirts three years ago and then they built another collection of t-shirts two years ago and then another one one year ago And actually part of like process that we did is a lot like the cleanup process of that as well but what they do is pretty where it's so easy to fill the collections they just go in and do them rather than optimize the ones already there But you're okay and I can get this collection where out of the head is as perhaps meaning something slightly different to a category but obviously it doesn't but to me a collection would also give the the user an opportunity to create the own collection is that something that Shopify allows as well. Is it like the user on site? I'm imagining something a little bit more like Pinterest where you can actually kind of create a selection of items that interest you that you may wish to go back to and perhaps purchase from at some point in the future. Yeah it's not so much from like a user perspective it's definitely from like the site owner perspective building out those collections in theory you can build out collections for different user types like away from from social and it could be the you have a Christmas gifts for dad collection and someone internally is picking out what they think is best based on customer data the product range things like that but it's not so much for for a user themselves to go and build the collection. And just do it okay and is there like an opportunity to create a sub collection so you'd maybe have a mean collection category than a sub category within that. Yeah and this is where we choose so much potential because we work with a lot of fashion rounds. If you sell clothing you can have a jeans collection page and you once properly optimize that but then within that you can have men's jeans women's jeans baggy jeans skinny jeans blue jeans black jeans and based on your product range. If you have the product range to suit you should 100% be building out those sub categories or sub collections because the other thing with that is that if someone specifically looking for skinny jeans they know what they're looking for you don't want to serve them all types of jeans you want to serve them exactly what they're looking for and that's why build out a sub collections it's just it's just so much opportunity. And does shop a five take care of the optimization for sub pages with within that collection and so if you go into multiple pages then you obviously did the SEO tells Google or whatever research her engine which which is the correct page in order to canonicalize for for that particular collection. Yeah so everything that needs to be optimised needs to be done by us or whoever's doing a recipe like the way that would work is it wouldn't necessarily sit under like slash jeans slash skinny you basically build out a new collections you have such a gene but you might have slash skinny jeans as a separate collection. In terms of the site hierarchy in terms of like if you have a navigation you might have a drop down where you have jeans and they come like underneath you have skinny jeans stuff like that but essentially it's it's on the same sort of like level as the jeans page the skinny jeans page would be and then you need to go in and the reason why like you want to do it manually the optimisation is because. There's so much opportunity out there you need to do like the full kind of keyword research optimisation content creation internal linking structure all that sort of stuff so it's quite a manual process but as an SEO like we want it to be manual process because if you if you want to target a specific audience you then need to be in a position that you know how to properly target them and you know exactly colors how your product range aligns with what they're looking for a marrying up the so. And as an ideal minimum and maximum number of items to include within a collection. I want to say there's there's a maximum number because typically many e-commerce sites will have like an all page where the collection is just every single thing that they have on the site I would typically say like there's not so much minimum you pretty don't want to create a collection if there is only one. And then the product in particular maybe one or two it kind of depends on like how deep your products ranges and like how many skewers you have we have sent the four for a collection where you might have two or three products there is still potential there when it's just one product it's a little bit more difficult especially if the products if the way the work products go in it out stalk and then the product kind of. And then you serve out stock products if you then kind of just four or fours you then get a position where your collection page has zero products if it's then coming back into the week's time but typically I think if you if you kind of want to start like three products I know it's not a lot but it gives you kind of a good foundation to be like right we've got three different types of skinny jeans let's put them here in this in this collection. I recommend is the minimum that you need to do in order to fully optimize these pages and for instance do you have a decent each one in there maybe a description of the collection and other elements in there. Yeah I mean the process that we follow is that we want to do like kind of full keyword research that will help us identify what people search for and how that marries up to the product range within the keyword mapping. So that's really important because when you go into the subcatteries side of things there is a lot of crossover so once you're in the keyword mapping we then look at the metadata so page title meta description we look at the H one tag as well. Once we've got those foundations built across like the kind of key pages then we'll go to go into the next phase which is building that on page copy building that internal linking structure. The reason why we phase it out is that we would rather have a collection page with minimal content and no internal links on live earlier rather than trying to get something perfect done in three months time so it's kind of in a phase approach let's get these collection pages live even if there's minimal content on there let's give them time to kind of be seen and that's when we're going to face to building that content building the internal linking structure look at the navigation and things like that. And to also say that this opens up a new world of potential revenue so is that potential revenue as in the ranking of these pages and search engines. Yeah so what we're seeing is that it just opens up how many people can find you so that a big part of this process is really trying to connect your audience to people that are searching non branded keywords and search terms. So for example if you're heavily reliant on brand which a lot of fashion brand we were fashion but like a lot of fashion brands are relying on on their own brand name. You're then not opening up a whole new world if you sell leggings to people looking for like these clothes or yoga clothes or running clothing or gym clothing and actually that's where we see so much potential because you're then targeting someone that isn't necessarily searching for your brand but the product lines and therefore that's how they come and find out about you or go. Right okay I didn't realize this brand sold that on the golden purchase so is that real kind of like removing that heavy reliance on branded search. The other reason why we do that is well with branded search can can go and picks and troughs so something has gone viral you might see a spike in in brand interest but then this time next year that can drop by creating these collection pages and putting more owners on non brand so terms. non-brides so times you'll then reducing that risk and then making sure you're still generating revenue from a non-brand perspective. How is AI search impacting traffic that you can drive to these pages? Are more people actually doing research and perhaps experiencing the content directly on platforms like chat GPT? So my thoughts on AI and its impact, especially like I'm talking through the perspective of like fashion e-commerce, is that I feel like the impact might be a little bit overstated. So the reason why I say that from a fashion perspective is the way that people shop even offline is they want to browse, they want to browse clothes, they want to understand, kind of, what's out there. If you bought three pairs of jeans in the past three months, it doesn't mean you want to buy another pair of jeans, you might want a pair of chinos or something else. Fashion changes over time and people then want to kind of browse and engage with the website. I think it impacts it more from like an informational blog copy perspective. So if you have a piece of content where it's like what are the best five shoes to wear with a casual suit? That's where I feel like you're going to see an impact from an AI perspective. I still think there's so much value in creating that content and even if it's them people are searching it through chat GPT, you then have a link to the article. But my perspective on this kind of like longer form of informational content is that really has to come secondary to the more transaction terms based on the collection pages. From a collection page perspective, again talking more so from the lens of a fashion is that we're not really seeing those search terms giving like AI overviews or people using chat GPT because it's less information. It's more like they're looking to buy they just want to browse what products are offer. So when we're on you're talking about I think T-shirts as an example in terms of there's lots of opportunity to rank for different terms and create different sub collections perhaps different colors or styles certainly. How do you know if you've gone too far if you've actually created too many different collections and you're different keywords that you're targeting are perhaps actually playing off each other and you're not creating an authoritative enough piece of content authoritative enough collection. So I do know which collections to get rid of if you've created too many. Yeah so I think from the perspective of a originally creating those collections, if you want to do that key web mapping you want to kind of see where is that overlap where are the issues. So that's why we do the key web mapping. So you can in theory have a t-shirt page then a long sleeve t-shirts and a long sleeve gray t-shirts but we can then start to see the overlap and go right from a data perspective. There is search around long sleeve gray and black and white t-shirts but actually we can kind of fill all of that in one collection page because we only have three or four long sleeve products that fit within there. So it's about seeing like how many products as we get more granular how many products kind of fit within that category that we could avoid building out. If you have gone in and created all these collections drawing sure what to do it really is like a big database that needs to be conducted. So we look at things from the perspective of optimize redirect or merge. So we'll look all the data be like right, all these collection pages which pages are generating clicks and impressions. We'll then look into it, the key web perspective are the pages that we want to rank for XYZ keywords going to the correct pages. If not is there some sort of like optimization so the optimization we need to do for other pages to kind of help shift it that way. So that's like the first step then we look at right out of these what pages just need further help. We know that there's benefit here because we've got five black t-shirts. We want to optimize the black t-shirt page but then we can look at actually we're not targeting baggy or oversized or slim fit whatever it is that also has data on black t-shirts. You then after that what you've done that you then want to look at the redirect side of things. If we know that actually previously we sold bomber jackets but those jackets don't exist anymore that's when we're like go right let's redirect that to the most appropriate page. That's a really important thing so we don't just want to redirect it to the home page. If we know that there's a similar style to bomber jacket we might redirect it there if not which redirect to the jacket page and then you have merging and that kind of covers what you said. If there's too many collections that are similar that's when you look to merge so it might be like right we've got three or four variations of long sleeve t-shirts all targeting slight different terms but actually the data is saying that none of these pages are really that authoritative. Let's merge the content together and build like one really strong page with more products in it and that's kind of the approach that we would take and then redirect the audio or else that kind of main page. Joel what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today? The key takeaway from the tip that I shared today is if you only come aside build up collection pages because you are then going to open up a whole new world of untapped revenue. Go Hill is founder of Verdi Digital find out more over at Verdi Digital.com Joel thanks so much for being part of SEO in 2026. Cheers David thank you. I've been your host David Bane get your copy of SEO in 2026 the book over at SEO in 2026.com [Music]